American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American ...
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American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American novel in this tumultuous period, highlighting works that protest the overvaluation of kinship in American culture, depicting the domestic family as antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Far from venerating the family as the nucleus of the nation, these novels imagine, even welcome, the decline of this institution and the social order it supports. Despite the founders’ concern that unseemly reverence for family relations might taint the new republic, the familial rhetoric of nationalism was deployed so energetically throughout the nineteenth century that reverence for the family came to seem like a core American value. Imaginative literature in this period retains an interest in the value of cutting blood ties, prizing the American dream of freedom from inherited identity. This study highlights works that criticize the expansion of the concept of family, viewing kinship as not only inadequate but dangerous in application to politics, suggesting that democratic citizenship should serve as the basis for coalitions across ascriptive differences. Six chapters chart the literary representation of the American family in relation to legal, scientific, literary, and political discourses from antebellum abolitionism through the Reconstruction suffrage debates, the burgeoning of feminism, and the “nadir” of post-Emancipation African American experience at the turn of the twentieth century.Less

American Blood : The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850-1900

Holly Jackson

Published in print: 2013-11-06

American Blood foregrounds a culture-wide struggle over the definition and value of the family in the nineteenth-century United States. This study offers a new vision of the American novel in this tumultuous period, highlighting works that protest the overvaluation of kinship in American culture, depicting the domestic family as antagonistic to the political enterprise of the United States. Far from venerating the family as the nucleus of the nation, these novels imagine, even welcome, the decline of this institution and the social order it supports. Despite the founders’ concern that unseemly reverence for family relations might taint the new republic, the familial rhetoric of nationalism was deployed so energetically throughout the nineteenth century that reverence for the family came to seem like a core American value. Imaginative literature in this period retains an interest in the value of cutting blood ties, prizing the American dream of freedom from inherited identity. This study highlights works that criticize the expansion of the concept of family, viewing kinship as not only inadequate but dangerous in application to politics, suggesting that democratic citizenship should serve as the basis for coalitions across ascriptive differences. Six chapters chart the literary representation of the American family in relation to legal, scientific, literary, and political discourses from antebellum abolitionism through the Reconstruction suffrage debates, the burgeoning of feminism, and the “nadir” of post-Emancipation African American experience at the turn of the twentieth century.

During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) was celebrated as one of the “seventy most famous women of all time” in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). ...
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During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) was celebrated as one of the “seventy most famous women of all time” in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Michel de Montaigne, as well as his editor, she was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France. This volume presents translations of four of Gournay's works that address feminist issues. Two of these appear here in English for the first time: The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne and The Apology for the Woman Writing. One of the first modern psychological novels, the best-selling Promenade was also the first to explore female sexual feeling. With the autobiographical Apology, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. The book also includes her last revisions (1641) of her two best-known feminist treatises: The Equality of Men and Women and The Ladies' Complaint. The editors provide a general overview of Gournay's career, as well as individual introductions and extensive annotations for each work.Less

Apology for the Woman Writing and Other Works

Marie le Jars de Gournay

Published in print: 2002-03-15

During her lifetime, the gifted writer Marie le Jars de Gournay (1565–1645) was celebrated as one of the “seventy most famous women of all time” in Jean de la Forge's Circle of Learned Women (1663). The adopted daughter of Michel de Montaigne, as well as his editor, she was a major literary force and a pioneering feminist voice during a tumultuous period in France. This volume presents translations of four of Gournay's works that address feminist issues. Two of these appear here in English for the first time: The Promenade of Monsieur de Montaigne and The Apology for the Woman Writing. One of the first modern psychological novels, the best-selling Promenade was also the first to explore female sexual feeling. With the autobiographical Apology, Gournay defended every aspect of her life, from her moral conduct to her household management. The book also includes her last revisions (1641) of her two best-known feminist treatises: The Equality of Men and Women and The Ladies' Complaint. The editors provide a general overview of Gournay's career, as well as individual introductions and extensive annotations for each work.

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. ...
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While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. This book, the first book-length study written in English, examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City. The book situates de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Focusing on the poet's contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture, the book moves beyond the tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to examine her place within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture. The book unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.Less

Becoming Julia de Burgos : The Making of a Puerto Rican Icon

Vanessa Pérez Rosario

Published in print: 2014-10-15

While it is rare for a poet to become a cultural icon, Julia de Burgos has evoked feelings of bonding and identification in Puerto Ricans and Latinos in the United States for over half a century. This book, the first book-length study written in English, examines poet and political activist Julia de Burgos's development as a writer, her experience of migration, and her legacy in New York City. The book situates de Burgos as part of a transitional generation that helps to bridge the historical divide between Puerto Rican nationalist writers of the 1930s and the Nuyorican writers of the 1970s. Focusing on the poet's contributions to New York Latino/a literary and visual culture, the book moves beyond the tragedy-centered narratives of de Burgos's life to examine her place within a nuanced historical understanding of Puerto Rico's peoples and culture. The book unravels the cultural and political dynamics at work when contemporary Latina/o writers and artists in New York revise, reinvent, and riff off of Julia de Burgos as they imagine new possibilities for themselves and their communities.

In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the female ...
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In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the female genital mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across Africa's “excision belt” have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from “the cult of culture” and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. They have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, this book interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision's “fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification.Less

Between Rites and Rights : Excision in Women's Experiential Texts and Human Contexts

Chantal Zabus

Published in print: 2007-08-24

In the past five decades and over three generations, African women writers have introduced a new autobiographical discourse around their experience of excision that brings nuance to the female genital mutilation debate. Spanning pharaonic times through classical antiquity to the onset of the twenty-first century, this study shows how this experiential body of literature—encompassing English, Arabic, and French—goes far beyond such traditional topics as universalism and cultural relativism, by locating the female body as a site of liminality between European and African factions, subject and agent; consent and dissent; custom and human rights. Women across Africa's “excision belt” have broken away from the male discourses of anthropology and psychoanalysis and have fled from “the cult of culture” and from religious and patriarchal surveillance. They have relocated their struggle to the West, where they seek empowerment and wrestle with the law. While showing the limits of autobiography, this book interweaves Freudian hysteria, the surgical age, the world of high fashion, male circumcision's “fearful symmetry,” and Western body modification.

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical ...
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This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical narrative for its denizens. They are literary artifacts, bearing the vestiges of the past while provoking new interpretations. As visionaries and composers of New World history, Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala and Auta de Souza are a part of a larger process of conceptualizing freedom in the New World. Frances Harper’s trans-hemispheric poetic gestures delimit the scope of this project. By exemplifying the kind of readings that can evolve from following one poet’s trans-hemispheric allusions and articulate the fundamentally transnational aspect of African American literature in the United States, and inspire more re-evaluations of trans-hemispheric literary currents across national boundaries in afrodescendente literatures. The spectre of race and its particular performances of gender identities among afrodescendente peoples in the New World, informs these poetics but does not conform them to a monolithic body of national literature. Afrodescendente poetry in the Americas highlights the power of words to imagine new histories and new forms of identity. In their interplay, the poems tell us certain truths about how the concept of freedom can evolve. They say: “Freedom” cannot be understood as a byproduct of slavery’s abolition. They say: Freedom is a poetic process. They say: Freedom cannot just be legislated, it has to be written.Less

Between the Lines : Literary Transnationalism and African American Poetics

Monique-Adelle Callahan

Published in print: 2011-03-16

This book maintains that the poetic texts examined here constitute an active process of composing history; they are not simply historicized. They give name to the nation and compose of a historical narrative for its denizens. They are literary artifacts, bearing the vestiges of the past while provoking new interpretations. As visionaries and composers of New World history, Frances Harper, Cristina Ayala and Auta de Souza are a part of a larger process of conceptualizing freedom in the New World. Frances Harper’s trans-hemispheric poetic gestures delimit the scope of this project. By exemplifying the kind of readings that can evolve from following one poet’s trans-hemispheric allusions and articulate the fundamentally transnational aspect of African American literature in the United States, and inspire more re-evaluations of trans-hemispheric literary currents across national boundaries in afrodescendente literatures. The spectre of race and its particular performances of gender identities among afrodescendente peoples in the New World, informs these poetics but does not conform them to a monolithic body of national literature. Afrodescendente poetry in the Americas highlights the power of words to imagine new histories and new forms of identity. In their interplay, the poems tell us certain truths about how the concept of freedom can evolve. They say: “Freedom” cannot be understood as a byproduct of slavery’s abolition. They say: Freedom is a poetic process. They say: Freedom cannot just be legislated, it has to be written.

This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely ...
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This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's “nationalist internationalism,” which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, the book shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, this book contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.Less

Cheryl Higashida

Published in print: 2011-12-01

This book examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's “nationalist internationalism,” which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, the book shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, this book contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.

In 1734 Swift wrote to Mary Granville: ‘A pernicious error prevails…that it is the duty of your sex to be fools’. As Mrs Delaney, she was to become one of a group of intelligent women who actively ...
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In 1734 Swift wrote to Mary Granville: ‘A pernicious error prevails…that it is the duty of your sex to be fools’. As Mrs Delaney, she was to become one of a group of intelligent women who actively denied such a duty, and whose literary receptions drew in many of the finest minds of the day. This book traces the rise, development, and decline of the Bluestocking Circle, between 1740 and 1800, through a close analysis of the lives and works of the women who made up the group. Drawing substantially on previously unpublished information and quoting widely from the group's letters to each other, the author supplies much detail on the relationships, social lives, and writings of the Circle.Less

The Bluestocking Circle : Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England

Sylvia Harcstark Myers

Published in print: 1990-08-30

In 1734 Swift wrote to Mary Granville: ‘A pernicious error prevails…that it is the duty of your sex to be fools’. As Mrs Delaney, she was to become one of a group of intelligent women who actively denied such a duty, and whose literary receptions drew in many of the finest minds of the day. This book traces the rise, development, and decline of the Bluestocking Circle, between 1740 and 1800, through a close analysis of the lives and works of the women who made up the group. Drawing substantially on previously unpublished information and quoting widely from the group's letters to each other, the author supplies much detail on the relationships, social lives, and writings of the Circle.

María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) took the veil as a Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving ...
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María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) took the veil as a Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, she fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church. María wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and the staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, she demonstrates through fictional conversations among a group of nuns during their hours of recreation how women could serve as very effective spiritual teachers for each other. The book includes one of the first biographical portraits of Teresa and María's personal account of the troubled founding of the Discalced convent at Seville, as well as María's tribulations as an Inquisitional suspect. Rich in allusions to women's affective relationships in the early modern convent, it also serves as an example of how a woman might write when relatively free of clerical censorship and expectations.Less

Book for the Hour of Recreation

Maria de San Jose Salazar

Published in print: 2002-10-01

María de San José Salazar (1548–1603) took the veil as a Discalced (“barefoot”) Carmelite nun in 1571, becoming one of Teresa of Avila's most important collaborators in religious reform and serving as prioress of the Seville and Lisbon convents. Within the parameters of the strict Catholic Reformation in Spain, she fiercely defended women's rights to define their own spiritual experience and to teach, inspire, and lead other women in reforming their church. María wrote this book as a defense of the Discalced practice of setting aside two hours each day for conversation, music, and the staging of religious plays. Casting the book in the form of a dialogue, she demonstrates through fictional conversations among a group of nuns during their hours of recreation how women could serve as very effective spiritual teachers for each other. The book includes one of the first biographical portraits of Teresa and María's personal account of the troubled founding of the Discalced convent at Seville, as well as María's tribulations as an Inquisitional suspect. Rich in allusions to women's affective relationships in the early modern convent, it also serves as an example of how a woman might write when relatively free of clerical censorship and expectations.

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, ...
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Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. This book concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, the book explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As the book shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, the book ranges across the works of well-known and lesser-known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.Less

Njeri Githire

Published in print: 2014-11-01

Postcolonial and diaspora studies scholars and critics have paid increasing attention to the use of metaphors of food, eating, digestion, and various affiliated actions such as loss of appetite, indigestion, and regurgitation. As such stylistic devices proliferated in the works of non-Western women writers, scholars connected metaphors of eating and consumption to colonial and imperial domination. This book concentrates on the gendered and sexualized dimensions of these visceral metaphors of consumption in works by women writers from Haiti, Jamaica, Mauritius, and elsewhere. Employing theoretical analysis and insightful readings of English- and French-language texts, the book explores the prominence of alimentary-related tropes and their relationship to sexual consumption, writing, global geopolitics and economic dynamics, and migration. As the book shows, the use of cannibalism in particular as a central motif opens up privileged modes for mediating historical and sociopolitical issues. Ambitiously comparative, the book ranges across the works of well-known and lesser-known writers to tie together two geographic and cultural spaces that have much in common but are seldom studied in parallel.

A brilliant scholar and one of the finest writers of her day, Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526–1555) was attacked by some as a “Calvinist Amazon” but praised by others as an inspiration to all learned ...
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A brilliant scholar and one of the finest writers of her day, Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526–1555) was attacked by some as a “Calvinist Amazon” but praised by others as an inspiration to all learned women. This book publishes all her known writings—orations, dialogues, letters, and poems—in an English translation. Raised in the court of Ferrara in Italy, Morata was educated alongside the daughters of the nobility. As a youth she gave public lectures on Cicero, wrote commentaries on Homer, and composed poems, dialogues, and orations in both Latin and Greek. Morata also became a prominent Protestant evangelical, studying the Bible extensively and corresponding with many of the leading theologians of the Reformation. After fleeing to Germany in search of religious freedom, she tutored students in Greek and composed what many at the time felt were her finest works: a series of translations of the Psalms into Greek hexameters and sapphics.Less

The Complete Writings of an Italian Heretic

Olympia Morata

Published in print: 2003-06-01

A brilliant scholar and one of the finest writers of her day, Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526–1555) was attacked by some as a “Calvinist Amazon” but praised by others as an inspiration to all learned women. This book publishes all her known writings—orations, dialogues, letters, and poems—in an English translation. Raised in the court of Ferrara in Italy, Morata was educated alongside the daughters of the nobility. As a youth she gave public lectures on Cicero, wrote commentaries on Homer, and composed poems, dialogues, and orations in both Latin and Greek. Morata also became a prominent Protestant evangelical, studying the Bible extensively and corresponding with many of the leading theologians of the Reformation. After fleeing to Germany in search of religious freedom, she tutored students in Greek and composed what many at the time felt were her finest works: a series of translations of the Psalms into Greek hexameters and sapphics.